Abjection and intimacy: Confronting the sick monstrous body in Alice Munro’s ‘Cortes Island’

This article examines Alice Munro’s short story ‘Cortes Island’, focusing on the figure of Mr Gorrie, a sick, aged and partially paralysed man who emerges as an object of horror and a catalyst for a young woman’s transformation. The analysis argues that Munro employs the sick monstrous body as a metaphor for abjection and otherness, compelling the young narrator to confront her own fears. Special attention is given to the materiality of the body, since Munro’s narrative foregrounds the physical presence of Mr Gorrie’s body: its texture, weight and disruptive potential. Mr Gorrie’s body leaks, decays and resists containment, exposing the fragility of personal and domestic boundaries. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject and Freud’s concept of the uncanny, the article explores how intimate encounters with the abject provoke psychic and emotional development, marking the narrator’s ambiguous passage into adulthood. Ultimately, the story is read as a subversive reworking of the ‘Beauty and the Beast’ motif, where the monstrous other remains unresolved, shaping female subjectivity through uneasy intimacy with vulnerability, decay and the insistent materiality of the human body.